Due to the nature of the Internet, people may be viewing your web page with many different types of browsers such as a text-only browser, a voice browser, or a cell phone; they may be clicking through your site without a mouse, or keyboard, or they may be browsing hands-free. Some people may be accessing your website under less than ideal lighting situations or in very loud places. A good web developer will create their web sites in such a way that any of these browsers in any situation will be able to check out your site with ease.

Here’s a quick list of simple things that you can do to make your website more accessible:

1. Non-text content (e.g. images) have descriptive alt or longdesc text
2. Don’t rely on colour alone to get your point across
3. Mark up your documents properly; use a p element for paragraphs and a table element for tabular data
4. Use the lang attribute to specify what the language of your document is
5. Identify row and column headers in tables
6. Group rows and columns using the thead, tfoot, tbody, col, and colgroup elements
7. Organize your documents so they can be logically read without style sheets, in other words, put your content in order on the page
8. Make sure that your page is usable without Javascript or use noscript element to indicate otherwise
9. Don’t use blinking, moving, or scrolling object that can’t be stopped
10. Use clear and simple language
11. Test your pages in multiple browsers with Javascript and images turned off. Don’t forget to try text only!
12. Validate your pages using the W3C validators for CSS, HTML, and Accessibility